When Jim Ball ran a traditional call center in Golden, Colo., in the late 1990s, employee turnover was rampant. Often, Ball was forced to hire just about anyone who walked in the door because few people were willing to commute to the call center and sit in a sterile cubicle for minimum wage.

When Ball and his partner Steve Rockwood sold the call center in 1997, they decided the next business would be radically different: Customer service agents would work from home.

“You just did a very bad thing,” said Bill Gates, reacting to a presentation of Stan Slap’s suggestions. In this excerpt from his upcoming book, “Bury My Heart at Conference Room B,” consultant Stan Slap relates how Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and a room full of Microsoft execs loved and loathed the concept of leading with your values.

If you were tasked with finding an image of the FBI’s seal, where would you look? Likely, you’d head to Google or Bing, where a quick image search would return tens of thousands of results. But shhh, don’t tell the FBI about those. Out of all the images of the seal sprayed across the Web, the FBI is faulting Wikipedia for displaying it, and even threatening legal action.Read More.

Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report wowed audiences with its futuristic tech: flashy hand-gesture computers, flex-screen displays, holograms, and Lexus-designed auto-piloted vehicles. The sci-fi flick also showed the world a dystopian, draconian picture of a crime-free society: “precogs” predicting murders, eye-scanners dotting the streets and subways, a jet-pack-toting police force, and a public seemingly deprived of any right to privacy. Spielberg envisioned this for 2054, but advances in technology are bringing that future sooner and sooner. Here’s a look at some of our own sci-fi crime fighting tools.Read More.

Just turning on the antennas caused two dozen phones in the room to connect to Paget’s tower. He then set it to spoof an AT&T tower to capture calls from customers of that carrier.“As far as your cell phones are concerned, I am now indistinguishable from AT&T,” he said. “Every AT&T cell phone in the room will gradually start handing over to my network.” Read More.